Exploration+Discovery

From protecting our oceans to detecting cancer, join some of the world's top explorers as they share their work in the field. This panel kicks off National Geographic's Explorers Symposium, one of the year's most highly anticipated events. (Participants: Marine ecologist Enric Sala; author and campaigner Tristram Stuart; conservation biologist Shivani Bhalla; and inventor Jack Andraka).

The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. New clips air every Monday.

Exploration+Discovery

From protecting our oceans to detecting cancer, join some of the world's top explorers as they share their work in the field. This panel kicks off National Geographic's Explorers Symposium, one of the year's most highly anticipated events. (Participants: Marine ecologist Enric Sala; author and campaigner Tristram Stuart; conservation biologist Shivani Bhalla; and inventor Jack Andraka).

The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. New clips air every Monday.

Voiceover: I have the coolest job in the world. Now we're building things to understand more about the world around us.

Woman 1: I love this!

Man 3: That was insane.

Voiceover: We found eight new species of fish.

Man 4: Look.

Man 5: This is what we lost.

Woman 2: It turns out people really don't believe we can do this.

Voiceover: That's awesome, that's why I do what I do.

Boyd: And why don't we begin with our Explorer-in-Residence. We'll begin with Enric.

Enric: Great! I'm going to tell you a little story now. When I was a kid growing up on the Mediterranean coast of Spain I was completely fascinated by the documentaries that Jacques Cousteau showed us on TV. Now, that was in the 70s and he showed us these amazing coral reefs lots of sharks, whales, sea lions, it was so fantastic. But when I was swimming in the ocean, when I was diving, when I was later the professor at the University of California, this what I saw. Those coral reefs that he showed us were gone. Places that I loved were less and less alive over time. So I was studying human impacts in the ocean. And I saw those dead reefs covered by algae and slime and the big fishes were gone. These fish that you can see are smaller than my diving masks. I quit my job as a professor and I just started going to these remote places. And I started this project that we call Pristine Seas. The goal of this project is to go to the most remote, uninhabited, untouched places in the ocean, the wildest places in the ocean. A coral reef that looks like this, where the corals are alive and predators dominate. And we combine exploration, scientific research, compelling media and then we inspire the leaders of the countries that own these places to protect them in very large reserves. In the last five years, we've been to nine places. And we got five protected. Covering a total of almost half a million square kilometers. And in the next few years we are going to a few more of these places to try to protect the last places that still look like the ocean that was thousands of years ago. Thank you.

Boyd: Now Tristram Stuart is gonna give us a little overview of his work quickly.

Tristram: We're chopping down rainforest to grow more food but at the same time, a billion people are hungry. And yet we're wasting one third of the world's food supply. That is something of a tragedy but I've made it my life's mission to show that this is a colossal opportunity. If we need to cut down our environmental impact and increase food availability where it's needed most, cutting food waste is a really good place to start. These green beans show you just how simple some of the solutions to food waste can be. I draw your attention to the word trimmed. These beans have been trimmed to size to fit into these plastic containers. That means that Kenyan farmers growing these beans for export to European markets, are cutting sometimes 30, 40 percent of the beans they've grown in a country were the land and the water that they're using to grow these beans are scarce resources. 20 tons a day of waste coming out of this single depot, just outside Nairobi, and contractors collecting this waste have to sign a contract saying they won't feed any of this good food to hungry people. It will all be treated as waste. We're paying for that crime in our supply chains. What we did is four things. First of all, raise awareness through public campaigns on ugly fruit and vegetables and why these standards are unnecessary. Number two, pass a law within the United Kingdom saying that when supermarkets cause their suppliers to waste food, they should share the cost of it. Number three, help farmers in those countries develop secondary markets to get some of that food to markets. And number four, work with the supermarkets to change those standards. We got Tescos to change the way they ask for the beans to be trimmed. They now trim only on one side of the bean rather than two, it's not far enough. They've gone half way but Kenyan farmers... ...are producing five percent more bean per unit of production than they were before. We did that in a few months. Similar story with bananas in Ecuador. That's the waste of one banana plantation after one day of harvest. Bananas in Costa Rica. These are carrots being wasted because they are too long to fit into these supermarket plastic crates.

It's crazy and it's happening everywhere. We have led a global revolution against food waste by doing positive campaigning and feeding the five thousand, which is the name of our organization, at an event that we used to launch our campaigns where we feed five thousand people, all on food that would otherwise be wasted, Filling bellies, not bins. We also set up the Gleaning Network in Britain and now across Europe were we take volunteers to fields to harvest some of this unused crop and get it people who are hungry and also communicate about those basic, original sources of food waste and what we can do about it. My next mission is to come to America. I'm here now and I'm making friends. And I will show you why it's most important. What this shows is that America has twice as much food in its shops and restaurants than is actually required to keep the population alive. That is a huge opportunity to save money, save resources, save impact on the environment. We're gonna start with portion sizes and we're gonna move up to the farms. We're gonna cause a food waste revolution here in America, we're coming soon. Thank you very much.

Boyd: Excellent. And now Shivani Bhalla from our Big Cats initiative in Kenya.

Shivani: In under a century we have lost over 90 percent of our planet's lions. Where I'm from in Kenya the situation is just as serious. We have only two thousand lions left in our country. We work to try and understand why this is happening. Lions are running out of space. They also come in to contact with people. The local people, whose livelihoods depend on their livestock, are often targeted by lions. In Samburu, in northern Kenya where I live, our population has grown from 11 lions to over 50 now as a result of conservation efforts. I work with a team and our mission is to promote the co-existence between lions and people in northern Kenya. We do this through a number of community programs. One of which is our warrior program known as Warrior Watch. Here in this picture you see three of the warriors I work with. Previously neglected when it came to conservation, these warriors are now wildlife ambassadors. They're engaged in conservation. We have 16 warriors now working in the region. When we started the program, we asked the warriors what would you like in exchange for all this great wildlife information that you give us? And they said, we would like education. We have never been to school. These are young men aged between 15 to 25, who've never had that opportunity to go and learn how to read and write. We've now changed this. And over the last five years all 17 of our warriors can read and write, both in English and the national language, Kiswahili. This picture was taken a couple of weeks ago at our annual lion kids camp. They've never seen a lion. They've only heard negative experiences with lions. They'd seen the remains of a camel after a lion had preyed on them. But we changed that, we took these kids to see their first ever lion. And their faces say it all. As they saw their first lion they whispered to me, Simba Simba. And this is what gives me hope for the future. Thank you.

Boyd: And now Jack Andraka, our inventor.

Jack: So I suppose my story really began when I was 13, when a close family friend, who was like an uncle to me, actually passed away from pancreatic cancer. And when the disease hit so close to home, I knew I needed to learn more. So I went online to find answers and what I had found really shocked me. You see 85 percent of all pancreatic cancers are diagnosed late, when someone has less than a two percent chance of survival. And as I looked deeper, I found an even more shocking statistic. You see there is currently no standard way for detecting pancreatic cancer. Our conventional method is the 60 year old technique. I mean first off that's older than my dad...but also it costs $800 per test and it's grossly inaccurate, missing 30 percent of all cancers and thus is rarely ever used for screening of pancreatic cancer. So armed with eighth grade biology, I decided to set out to change the field of cancer diagnostics. Bit lofty of a goal but I was going to do it. And so essentially what I did is I stumbled across how we are currently diagnosing these cancers and what we're doing is we're looking at your blood stream particularly for these variations in protein levels and while it sounds extremely straightforward, it's anything but because you have liters and liters of blood which is about an innumerable numbers of these proteins. So it's like trying to find a needle in a stack of nearly identical needles.

However, undeterred due to my teenage optimism or how some people label it, complete and utter ignorance of the entire field, I continued on and I essentially found a database of 8000 proteins that are found in your bloodstream when you have these cancers. Essentially I found this one protein that I could use called mesothelin and it's just your ordinary run of the mill type protein, unless of course you have pancreatic, ovarian or lung cancer. In which case it's found in these very high levels in your blood stream. But also the key is, is that it's found in earlier stages of the disease. When someone has close to 100 percent chance of survival and essentially what I did is I combined something called carbon nanotubes, essentially the superheros of material, these long thin tubes of carbon. They have these amazing properties. And all you do is it's like making chocolate chip cookies. You put them in this giant thing of water. You pour in some nanotubes, add some antibodies, which are molecules that only react with one cancer biomarker, mix it up, take some paper, dip it, dry it and you can detect cancer. And then I sent out my procedure to 200 labs at Johns Hopkins University, got a 199 No's. Seven months later after getting accepted into a lab, I stumble out with one small paper sensor that cost three cents and takes five minutes to run, making it 168 times faster, over 26,000 times less expensive and over 400 times more sensitive than our conventional methods of detection. But also so far it can detect the cancer in the earliest stage when someone has close to 100 percent chance of survival and so far has over 90 percent accuracy. It can be broadly applied to pretty much any disease, ranging from Alzheimer's, other forms of cancer, even HIV, AIDS and heart disease. So that's my research.

Boyd: So Enric one thing you have found which, this is a really great news, is if you can set aside a marine area and keep... and just make it a reserve for a brief period of time and we've been able to do that, you were talking about some of the successes in your talk, because it was once a desert doesn't mean it will always stay a desert. It comes back.

Enric: Exactly, the ocean and nature has this incredible capacity to rebound. This photograph was taken on the Medes Islands Marine Reserve, on the Costa Brava in northern Spain. And this guy is Pierre-Yves Cousteau, Jacques Cousteau's youngest son. And next to him is a 25 kilo grouper, la cernia, which are gone from most of the Mediterranean, except in Marine reserves. Think about most of the ocean like a debit account where everybody withdraws and nobody makes a deposit. You don't need to be an economist to know what's going to happen. But this reserve where there is no fishing is like a savings account where principal set aside that produces interest. So the abundance of fish, there are tons of fish per square mile in the reserves, increases 450 percent in less than 10 years. Boyd: And how hard is it to people to set aside an area, to say if you only stop fishing for 10 years, you'll be so amply rewarded? Enric: The benefits to fishing are happen earlier. In some places in actually the last three years after creation of the reserves there are so many fish inside the reserve, they reproduce so much, that some of these fish spill over the boundaries of these reserves so the fishermen are catching more outside, that's the interest.

Boyd: Tristram, let's just put it out on the line. You're a dumpster diver. You go around and you spy on people's trash. But what have you found? Is that where you first got the clue how much was being thrown out of restaurants and grocery stores?

Tristram: Yeah, it is. Actually I was 15 also when my mission started. I was collecting food waste for my pigs from my school canteen, the local baker, and the green grocer but I realized that most of the food I was giving to my pigs was actually perfectly good for human consumption. And I remember the day, I sat down for breakfast with my pigs and ate one of this perfectly good loaves of bread that the baker had chucked away and that was the first act of what you could call dumpster diving or freeganism. This photograph, you see, I moved to London a few years ago, and I stopped being able to keep pigs. So I decided to launch campaign on feeding food waste to pigs, which is the next best thing after you've exhausted all possibilities for feeding it to humans. Processed pig food which has been grown by deforesting the Amazon to grow soy. Europe imports 40 million tons every year. This is the worst thing that is going on on the planet at the moment. We're chopping down forest to grow more food and we can cancel out a lot of demand for that by changing the way, first of all we eat and waste food, and secondly the way we produce meat by using waste products rather than using virgin crops.

Boyd: Shivani, all of us have had neighbors we didn't exactly get along with. In this case for the Samburu, the lions are their neighbors. If you wanna make peace, you invite them over for dinner. So how do you make friends if your neighbors are lions? What do you do to make that relationship harmonious?

Shivani: The big problem in this area is conflict. So when lions come along and they attack people's livestock, this is when people don't like lions. They don't want lions in their area. So we work with the communities to reduce conflict. We try to encourage them to look after livestock better. One of the big issues is livestock is always often lost. So lions come across sleeping camels at night far from the village and they will attack them. So we encourage them look after your livestock better. Don't send young children out to look after your livestock because of course a little boy is scared of lions, yet warriors are not scared of lions. Also a night livestock are kept in what are known as bomas, livestock enclosures. We work with them to reinforce their bomas. So at least they can be more predator-proof. Predators can't get in easily and livestock can't get out. So there are lots of ways we can work with the local people to reduce conflict from happening in the first place. And then they're much more willing to live with lions.

Boyd: Good fences do make good neighbors in this case.

Shivani: Good fences do make good neighbors.

Boyd: Now Jack, you came up with this idea. How do know that it works? Are you in testing? Did the head of the lab-- How did he react when you said, look what I found and how long were you there, just over your summer vacation?

Jack: No for seven months.

Boyd: So he's been working there his entire career.

Jack: Yes

Boyd: You come in seven months later and what does he say?

Jack: I mean to even like get anything was like really exciting for him, he was in disbelief. But essentially what really tipped us off that was working, is its sensitivity. You see, it could detect down to like femtogram levels which was really incredible for these types of sensors, especially given its cost and how rapid it was. And so we, once we saw that then we started working with mouse blood samples and we saw that was effective there so we instantly submitted a patent and we're right now in talks with several different bio-tech companies about getting it on the market as soon as possible just because I, unfortunately can't run clinical trials. As a high school student I have SATs and prom to worry about.

Boyd: Now when we go to the Pristine Seas, we talk a lot about things that we put in the ocean. One thing that we put in the ocean are oil platforms. Turns out they actually create artificial reefs so this is actually a life source, these platforms. What have you discovered there? Is it spreading beyond the platforms? When we think of the oil wells, we think of the possibility of spills but why are they so popular for fish?

Enric: So we did a Pristine Seas expedition to Gabon. And the coast of Gabon is mostly sandy. And there are dozens of oil platforms. And these platforms are the only hard substrate in hundreds of kilometers of coast. We were told by the people at the oil companies about the safety. It was like we're going to dive into the Chernobyl reactor or something. It was-- They painted such a dire picture and we jumped in the water and we could not believe it. There were so many fish! Rainbow runners like these ones, tuna, sharks. In the first 20 meters, the first 60 feet of these platforms, there is more than one ton, a thousand kilos of fish.

Boyd: Is that because coral grows on the hard surface that it wouldn't have on the sandy bottom? The hard surface of the oil well.

Enric: Exactly, all the animals that live on reefs produce eggs and they turn into larvae that float. And if they don't find a hard substrate to settle, they die. So now there is this plan to work-- The government of Gabon is working with the oil companies, so the oil companies will enforce the area around the oil companies so there will be no fishing and there's going to be a haven for replenishing the rest of the coast of Gabon.

Boyd: Who would have thought we're holding a beauty contest for our fruits and vegetables? Can you stop the beauty contest? Does that begin with the market or the consumer?

Tristram: That's what the basis of our campaigns are all about. It's about instigating popular revolt. Literally it is revolting-- against food waste. This is why the big supermarkets and why governments are now listening to us. Not because we're right but because we have a popular movement behind us. And it's gonna sound funny but ugly fruit and vegetables since the launch of our campaign have become the fastest growing sector of the fresh produce market in the United Kingdom.

Boyd: Do they offer it at a different price?

Tristram: Different prices in some places or you just tell the story. If you're a high end demographic super market or farmer's market, you just say well the skin on these apples are blemished because it hailed during the autumn. And people like to hear that kind of story and will respond to that. I mean, we're doing the same thing with fish also. Fish are being chucked overboard that are perfectly good for consumption by a process called high grading. Basically only bring in the best specimens ashore. Because you got a finite hold and fishermen are chucking them away. In Europe that's being exacerbated by quota systems that make people chuck over quota fish aboard. And we're just changing the legislation in Europe now to make discarding valuable fish at sea-- 40 to 60 percent of fish caught in European waters is being chucked overboard.

Boyd: Now if you're going to get the local people involved in taking on the conservation as being important to them, they have to see some benefit beyond just the fact that they're lions. One you have to show them that tourist are not going to show up if they don't have elephants and lions, if they're all poached out. 'Cause that's what they're coming to see. So there's that dollar bit. But do those dollars from the tourist in any way get to them so that they see a direct benefit.

Shivani: Absolutely. So tourist that come to visit Samburu, there's a huge percentage that goes directly back to the community. The community then use these funds for health projects, for school bursaries, for water projects, because water is a big issue in our area. We're in a semiarid desert, there is no water. You literally have to dig for water in the dry river beds. So through the funds that they get from tourism they're able to do such things and have more access to water. Education is key. Sending their children to school is a big thing for them. Now they are able to do that through the benefits they get from tourism.

Boyd: And they make that connection between the lions programs you're doing the Ewaso...

Shivani: They do.

Boyd: and the education they're getting is because of the lions?

Shivani: Absolutely, yeah. So we've got a great relationship with the tourism, managements and lodges within our area. We work closely together so people can really understand the relationship between tourist and conservation and working with communities. And they have seen that.

Boyd: And you've got the Samburu Warriors who are walking around to see where the lions are, warning the people, if it's getting close to their cattle, but they're such great trackers. Do they also look for human tracks of poachers? Do you have 'em on the watch for that?

Shivani: They do, our warriors are basically out there looking out for anything so not just predators but people as well. Poaching is a big problem in our area, northern Kenya. So our warriors do notify the wardens, the rangers if they see any kind of tracks that look a little bit suspicious. They're very good at aging the tracks. They know exactly when that track has been through that area. They can tell from the type of shoes who it is. They are fantastic trackers and so they can really give information back to the authorities if there's anything that looks a little bit suspicious in that area.

Boyd: And let's just repeat the number. When you started this program you had 11 lions in your area and that was how many years ago?

Shivani: That was back in 2006. We had about 11 lions we were monitoring and now we're up to over 50 lions.

Boyd: 50. So it's working, whatever you're doing it's working, keep it up. Now Jack, tell us how it all started. Did you start like those of us who had chemistry sets when you were a kid, blowing up stuff?

Jack: I started out with a lot of environmental work so working with bioluminescent bacteria to detect water contaminants. Then I moved on to like nano ecotoxicity so investigate-- I did one of the first studies of its kind on the impacts of nano particles, versus bulk particles and their impacts on the aquatic ecosystems.

Boyd: I know you have something that will test water quality, what's that?

Jack: Yeah, yeah, yeah, so it's essentially something the size of a credit card that detects six different environmental contaminants and it's 200,000 times less expensive than our conventional methods. And so it cost a dollar and then also one of the very cool things about it, is that it can actually only take 20 minutes, 25 minutes to run and one of the coolest parts about that project-- That was kinda like the minor part of that project. The major part of that was developing a water filter out of recycled plastic water bottles. So essentially you can take water bottles and turn them into filters that filter out 95 percent of all heavy metals and pesticides in five minutes for 70 cents and then also you can actually put them in boiling water for just one minute and they will actually reclaim up to 90 percent of those contaminants of which you can then sell back and actually profit from filtering your water. So we are currently still testing with that so we do use it for like heavy metals, pesticides. It can also be used for like fracking contaminants, oil spill cleanup and has a wide variety of usage and now I'm moving on to indoor air quality.

Boyd: And there actually seven stages that successful people and all others have them but maybe not as much as some explorers. They all start with curiosity. You want to see can I find an answer. There must be a better test. They have hope which is not blind optimism. Hope is based on some knowledge that I can find an answer, that the information is out there. They have passion. Do they all have passion? Yeah. Courage, independence, self-discipline but none of it would succeed without perseverance, sticking with it, and then one person can make a difference. This is just a sample of the explorers at National Geographic. Thank you for participating in our opening!

Exploration+Discovery

From protecting our oceans to detecting cancer, join some of the world's top explorers as they share their work in the field. This panel kicks off National Geographic's Explorers Symposium, one of the year's most highly anticipated events. (Participants: Marine ecologist Enric Sala; author and campaigner Tristram Stuart; conservation biologist Shivani Bhalla; and inventor Jack Andraka).

The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. New clips air every Monday.